The Polar Bear Explorers' Club

by Alex Bell

  But then the racing wolves reached the other side of the bridge and the sled blades bit deep into snow – just as the last of the ice bridge collapsed. Stella looked behind her again, and felt a numb sort of horror at the sight of a vast, empty space where the ice bridge had been – where they had been – mere seconds ago. The terrified unicorn breathed out icy puffs of air in agitated snorts, cantering to keep up with the sled. Past the unicorn’s sweating flank Stella could see the explorers on the other side running around, waving their arms, chasing wolves and yelling their heads off in a general state of unhelpful pandemonium. She searched desperately for Felix but couldn’t pick him out in the crowd, although she thought she heard him shout out her name.

  Then the wolves shot into a cave entrance carved deep into the mountainside, and the adult explorers were lost from sight as the sled entered the cold, eerily quiet world of a vast ice tunnel, taking them further and further away from the other members of their expeditions, and ever deeper into whatever perilous unknown lay ahead.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The wolves were terrified, and although Shay kept shouting out the commands for them to stop, they completely ignored him and continued running at full pelt through the twisting, winding ice tunnels.

  ‘We’ve got to do something!’ Stella gasped. ‘We’ve got to stop them!’

  If they were on open snow they could let the wolves run until they burned all their fear and adrenaline away, but here in a narrow, twisting ice tunnel leading deeper and deeper into the side of a mountain, there could be anything up ahead. A gaping pit, a wall of rock, a hungry yeti. They had to get the wolves to stop, and quickly.

  Shay chewed furiously at his lower lip. Suddenly his head snapped up. He looked at Stella and said, ‘Sparky, I’ve just thought of something! Can you skate?’

  ‘I skate every day on the lake at home!’

  He reached into the bottom of the sled and fished out a tangle of skates. ‘We have to get to the wolves at the front,’ he said. ‘It’s the only way.’

  ‘You’re mad!’ Ethan exclaimed as Beanie continued muttering to himself under his breath. ‘You’ll get yourselves killed! No one can skate faster than running wolves!’

  Shay ignored Ethan and spoke to Stella. ‘We’ll have to grab onto the harness to get to the lead wolves at the front. If we can calm them, the others will follow.’

  The skates were all too large for Stella, but she took the smallest pair she could find, stuffed some gloves into the toes and tied up the laces as tight as she could. There wasn’t time to think after that. She and Shay took opposite sides of the sled and scrambled out. Stella clung onto the side with all her strength, then grabbed the wolf harness and dragged herself along, hand over hand, making sure to keep her skates facing forwards the whole time. On the other side she could see Shay doing the same thing.

  They reached the front, and Stella knew Shay was whispering to the wolf on his side because she could see the flash of red from the open eyes of the whisperer’s pendant at his throat. Stella spoke to the other wolf – which she saw was Kayko, the reddish female she had rescued from the storm – in a voice that she tried to make as low and soothing as possible. She saw a dark blur from the corner of her eye and realised that Shay’s shadow wolf, Koa, had appeared, and was racing along, keeping pace with her. She felt comforted by Koa’s presence, and the other wolves must have felt so too because their running slowed until it became a trot, then a walk, and then – finally – they stopped altogether, panting hard with their tongues hanging long from their mouths.

  Stella’s hands were trembling as she buried them in the lead wolf’s fur. ‘Good girl,’ she said as the wolf tried to lick her face. ‘Good girl.’

  ‘Good girl?’ Ethan repeated as he scrambled out of the sled. ‘They almost got us all killed!’

  ‘And whose fault is that, I wonder?’ Shay snapped. ‘They haven’t been trained properly. These wolves aren’t ready for polar exploration!’

  Ethan glared at him. ‘How do you know they’re Ocean Squid wolves?’

  ‘Look at their harness, you fool.’

  Sure enough, the harness was black for Ocean Squid, and had the club’s squid insignia stamped along the leather.

  Stella ignored their arguing, whispered her thanks to Koa – who’d calmly sat back on her haunches and was regarding the explorers with a placid look – and then skated around to check on the unicorn at the back.

  The unicorn was white from nose to tail, with a thick coat and feathered silky hair above her pearly hooves. She snorted at Stella in greeting, and didn’t seem too shaken up. The pale blue halter marked her as a Polar Bear unicorn, and therefore she would have been properly trained for expeditions like this. Her name – Glacier – was stitched in silver thread along the side of her harness. Stella fished in her pocket until she found some iced gems, and then held them out on her flat palm. Glacier took them gently and munched happily, spraying multi-coloured crumbs on the ice below.

  Beanie had stopped reciting morbid facts, but both his hands gripped the edge of the sled as if he’d never let it go. Stella walked around the side of the sled and looked at him. ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Are you okay?’

  He nodded at her wordlessly, but Stella couldn’t help noticing that he’d turned an unhealthy shade of green. Stella skated over to where Shay and Ethan were still arguing over the wolves. ‘Would you two stop that bickering?’ she said. ‘It’s getting on my nerves. And we need to work out what we’re going to do.’

  Beanie looked up. ‘We should turn around and go back to the others,’ he said.

  ‘We can’t,’ Shay replied. ‘The bridge collapsed.’

  Beanie turned pale. With his eyes screwed up tight during the wolves’ flight, he’d been blissfully ignorant of this important fact until now.

  ‘We’ll just have to stick to the plan,’ Stella said. ‘If we head towards the coldest part of the Icelands then we’ll probably meet up with the others along the way anyway.’

  They all peered at the ice tunnel twisting around a corner in front of them. For the first time, Stella noticed that it wasn’t as dark in the tunnel as it should have been. The entire place was filled with a cool, blue light, as if the sunlight from above was getting through somehow.

  ‘I can’t carry on with you lot!’ Ethan exclaimed. ‘I’m not part of your club – I have my own!’

  Shay clapped him on the back and said, ‘Well, I guess that’s just tough luck for all of us, Prawn. First rule of exploring: don’t go wandering off by yourself. Not unless you want to fall into a ravine, or get washed over a raging waterfall or some such, and never be seen or heard from again. We’re stuck with each other for now.’

  Ethan shook his head and kicked the side of the sled. ‘This is the worst expedition ever!’

  ‘We’re not exactly thrilled about it either,’ Stella told him.

  ‘If we’re the only explorers who made it across then it’s up to us to explore the area and see if there’s anything worth discovering,’ Beanie said. ‘Mum told me I have to prove to Uncle Benedict that I can be an explorer, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.’

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ Shay said cheerfully.

  ‘I wish I was at sea,’ Ethan groaned.

  ‘If it helps at all, we wish you were at sea too,’ Stella told him. ‘I wish you were at the bottom of the sea, actually.’

  Ethan’s Ocean Squid cloak didn’t help, either. Whilst the other three all wore pale blue cloaks that blended nicely with the ice and snow, Ethan’s black one made him stick out like a sore thumb. Any passing yeti would spot them a mile away, and they’d probably all get eaten as a result.

  Stella sighed and said, ‘Let’s look and see what provisions we have.’

  Although they’d lost a couple of bags at the ice bridge, there was still a pile tied to the sled, and Glacier carried several more. The explorers emptied out their pockets too and counted up what they had between them. There was an assortment of telescopes, S
tella’s compass, some gloves and blankets, a travel journal, a tripod camera, a top-hat box and a nasty-smelling box filled with round tins of Captain Filibuster’s Expedition-Strength Moustache Wax.

  They also had a sack of iced gems, some salted beef, a box of mint cake, some tinned Spam, a cooking pot and a small knife. And a gramophone, for what that was worth (explorers liked to listen to some music of an evening). There was also a magnificent wickerwork picnic basket filled with silver cutlery, fine china plates stamped with the Polar Bear Explorers’ Club crest, a couple of bottles of champagne and glass flutes. No doubt the champagne was for toasting a particularly fantastic find or amazing scientific discovery. But the weapons and most of the food had been with the other sleds, or in the two bags they’d lost. They found a long, thin bag strapped to the back of the sled that they thought might hold arrows but, was in fact, a map tube, filled with rolled-up maps.

  ‘Maybe you can magic up some more of those polar beans,’ Stella suggested to Ethan glumly. She didn’t think she’d care much for food that was giggling and cartwheeling about whilst she was trying to eat it, though.

  ‘Maybe we should slaughter these useless wolves,’ Ethan replied. ‘At least they’d be some help to us then.’

  Shay suddenly went very still. ‘Touch a single hair on the head of any one of these wolves,’ he said in a dangerously quiet voice, ‘and I promise you will get to see my not-so-nice side. And you won’t enjoy that one bit.’

  ‘Oh, calm down, I didn’t mean it,’ Ethan snapped. ‘Who wants to eat wolf meat anyway? Gross! Still, I suppose it will fall to me to prevent us all from starving to death out here in this forsaken frozen wasteland. It’s fortunate for you lot that I’m here or you’d all be dead within the hour.’

  ‘Oh, it takes longer than an hour to starve,’ Beanie hurried to reassure him. ‘Much longer.’

  The magician glanced at Beanie, then looked at Stella and said, ‘Perhaps you might come in handy with that compass of yours.’ He indicated Shay and said, ‘And he can look after the wolves he loves so much, I suppose. But what use is this one to anybody?’ He pointed at Beanie. ‘What’s he training to be? Bait?’

  ‘A medic,’ Stella snapped. ‘As you well know. So you’d better start being nice to him because if a yeti bites your arm off during the expedition then Beanie is the one who’ll be sewing it back on.’

  ‘You can’t sew an arm back on, Stella,’ Beanie said with a frown. ‘A finger, perhaps, but definitely not an arm. But if anyone loses any fingers or toes then I’ll sew them back on. Gladly.’

  Ethan shook his head. ‘You have to be extremely intelligent to be a medic; everyone knows that. If you’re a medic, then I’m a ballerina!’

  ‘Oh!’ Beanie suddenly looked excited. If there was one thing he loved more than jellybeans and narwhals, it was the ballet. ‘That’s wonderful! Although haven’t the dance academy tried to correct your slouching? You don’t meet slouching ballerinas too often, and you slouch something terrible.’

  Stella inwardly sighed. Poor Beanie. It never occurred to him to say anything other than exactly what he thought, without pausing to make his words softer or more palatable first. ‘But that would be like lying,’ he’d said when Stella had tried to talk to him about it once. ‘It’s not right to lie.’

  Ethan drew himself up to his full height. ‘I don’t slouch, and I’m not a ballerina!’

  Beanie looked more confused than ever. ‘But you just said—’

  ‘You might as well be a ballerina for all the use you are,’ Stella cut in. ‘Beanie is a junior medic and he has healing magic, which is a lot more valuable than creating polar beans out of thin air. He helps his mum at the hospital all the time back home, and she says he’s already more use than most of the doctors, and can tie bandages as well as any of the nurses.’

  ‘I wouldn’t trust him to tie his own shoelaces!’ Ethan scoffed.

  Stella tightened her hands into fists to stop herself from doing something she shouldn’t. Poking the magician in the eye, for example. Or flicking his pointed nose as hard as she could.

  Ethan pointed at Beanie’s bag and said, ‘What have you got in there? If you’re really training to be a medic, then your club would have given you a medical kit. Let’s see it.’

  Beanie obligingly opened up his bag, which seemed to contain a lot of jellybeans stored by colour in glass jars. But, after digging around, he produced the medical kit, which came in a pale blue pack, with the Polar Bear Explorers’ Club crest stamped on the front. Stella had never seen one before, and peered forwards curiously as Beanie unzipped it.

  She wasn’t quite sure what she expected to see. Rolls of bandages, perhaps, or various salves and ointments. Instead, when Beanie pushed back the lid, the pack was empty except for what looked like two miniature dog kennels, about the size of Stella’s hand. Everyone frowned down at them.

  ‘What are they, for heaven’s sake?’ Ethan demanded.

  Beanie tapped the roof of each kennel and instantly two miniature dogs, just a few inches long, came bounding out. They had thick, shaggy coats; pink tongues that lolled from their mouths in excitement; big, soppy faces; and little wooden barrels marked with a red cross tied around their collars.

  ‘That’s Murphy.’ Beanie pointed to one of the dogs. ‘And this is Monty. They’re brandy rescue dogs. The Polar Bear Explorers’ Club sends them out on expeditions because they say that a tot of brandy – that’s what they have in the barrels – will warm you up if you get lost in the snow.’ He frowned and added, ‘Actually, my medicine books say that drinking alcohol is the worst thing you can do if you get stuck in the snow, but I didn’t want the dogs to feel bad, so I thought I’d better take them along.’

  ‘But is that all you have?’ Ethan demanded as Beanie zipped the dogs back up in their case.

  ‘No, I have plasters too.’ Beanie held up a packet, and Stella was pleased to see that it was blue and had polar bears printed on it.

  ‘Oh, good,’ the magician said. ‘If one of us does get an arm bitten off by a yeti then I can see you’ll be totally in control of the situation.’

  ‘Oh, well, actually, you know, a plaster would be no use at all if you were to get your arm bitten off—’

  Before Beanie could finish, Ethan dramatically pointed a finger and cried, ‘Great Scott, what in the blazes is that devilish creature?’

  They all turned to see Koa, sat a little way off, and regarding them with a cool, calm expression on her handsome face.

  ‘That,’ Shay said, between gritted teeth, ‘is my shadow wolf, Koa.’

  ‘Is it rabid?’ Ethan asked with an affronted expression. ‘It looks rabid to me.’

  ‘Of course she’s not rabid!’ Shay snapped. ‘She’s a shadow animal, you prize idiot.’

  ‘I thought shadow animals were a fairy tale made up to scare children,’ the magician replied dubiously.

  ‘Well, guess again,’ Shay responded. ‘For there one sits before you.’ He shook his head, ran his hand through his long hair and said, ‘We’ve wasted enough time squabbling. Let’s load up and be on our way.’ He gave Ethan a look. ‘Before someone says something they might regret.’

  ‘We have to fix the flag first,’ the magician said, folding his arms over his chest stubbornly.

  Stella hadn’t even realised they were carrying the Polar Bear Explorers’ Club flag until now. It had been attached to their sled as the one in front, and still hung limply from the pole at the back.

  ‘What do you mean fix it?’ she demanded.

  ‘That’s a Polar Bear club flag,’ Ethan said, pointing at the explorers’ crest. It showed the symbol for all four explorer clubs, but only the polar bear was picked out in gold thread. ‘Well, I’m a member of the Ocean Squid Explorers’ Club.’ He pulled off his glove, snapped his fingers and the black line around the many-tentacled squid turned slowly gold.

  ‘The first joint expedition in history,’ Shay said, although he didn’t sound too happy about it.


  They repacked everything as best they could and Ethan, Beanie and Stella piled into the sled, whilst Shay hopped onto the back to control the wolves. They set off – more slowly this time – deeper into the mountain.

  A few hours later they reached the end of the tunnel, a moonlit snowy landscape stretching out beyond. Night had fallen whilst they’d been inside, so the explorers decided to make camp within the shelter of the tunnel for the night and get moving again first thing in the morning. They were all feeling a little unnerved, and Stella couldn’t help wishing Felix was with them. There was a brief argument when Beanie emptied out one of his jars of jellybeans and tried to offer the empty container to Ethan for him to put his teeth into, but once Stella got Beanie to understand that the magician didn’t really have false teeth, and once Ethan had stopped sulking at the suggestion that he did, the junior explorers bedded down in their blankets and sleeping bags, and finally went to sleep.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  That night, Stella had the dream again.

  She was sitting on a massive bed, playing with a beautiful tiara. It was covered in crystals and gems and ice-white stones that sparkled and shone in her hands. It was the prettiest thing she had ever seen.

  But then the dream shifted, turning into a nightmare. The tiara disappeared and Stella was hiding underneath the bed, staring out at a pair of horribly burnt feet that were slowly walking up and down the room, looking for her. The ruined feet were shrivelled with blackened skin and red, open sores. Every shuffling footstep must have been agony. There were huge angry blisters and crusty old scabs where the toenails ought to be. They were the most terrifying feet that Stella had ever seen.